Windows 10 Game Mode, introduced in Microsoft’s Creators Update in 2017, is reportedly the culprit behind stuttering, freezing, and lower FPS count issues across several games, including battle royale shooter Call of Duty: Warzone and MOBA League of Legends.
Designed to provide a boost to a PC’s gaming capabilities by optimizing CPU and GPU resources, Game Mode prioritizes allocations for games instead of other applications once the feature is activated. However, Game Mode has recently been doing the opposite — instead of improving the gaming experience, it is said to be making life harder for players.
Windows 10 Game Mode has resulted in stuttering and freezing on various PC games, including Call of Duty: Warzone and League of Legends, according to Guru3D. Complaints by PC owners claim that the problems affect computers running on either AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards. PCs with the Radeon RX 5700 XT, RX 570, RX 480, and R9 290 were identified as among those experiencing the issues, as well as the NVIDIA Geforce GTX 980 and GTX 1080 Ti.
There is a relatively fast and simple fix for this issue. It should only take a few minutes, but you can try to deactivate Game Mode through the Settings menu. Simply go to Settings>Gaming>Game mode and toggle it off to disable the feature. Make sure you reboot after disabling the Game Mode so that the changes take effect. This, according to some gamers, is a quick fix that has been able to solve the stuttering for a lot of players.
One of these players started a thread on Reddit. In the thread, the player explained the steps he took and claimed that disabling Game Mode fixed the problems that he was having on his PC. “The CRAZY intermittent stutters are TOTALLY gone in my testing. I don’t know if this is an established fix that many have tried but I figured I’d put it out there for anyone who doesn’t know yet,” he wrote. Even if it’s not an official or “confirmed” solution, plenty of other players have hopped on the thread to report that this quick fix corrected their stuttering and freezing issues as well.
If you happen to be dealing with the same stuttering problem, it’s probably worth a shot, especially considering that it only takes a few minutes to deactivate your Game Mode and then reboot it. If the fix doesn’t work for you then you can easily turn the feature back on.
It remains unclear why the Game Mode feature is making things worse for gaming instead of improving the experience. We hope that Microsoft is already aware of the issue and is working on a fix to make Game Mode do what it was designed to do.
